Why have domestic manufacturers been unable to improve their capabilities despite many chances?
As per current policies, domestic modules are only mandatory for rooftop solar while for land mounted Megawatt scale plants, any make or module (Indian/Chinese) is allowed. Off late, government has come up with DCR for even land mounted plants to promote domestic manufacturing. However, the policy is flawed as this requires that even the cells be manufactured in India.

Presently India has only 600-700 MW of operational cell capacity, while the module manufacturing capacity is approximately 2 GW. This has resulted in Indian cell manufacturers monopolising and charging exorbitant prices, which has in turn resulted in much higher prices for such projects, especially as compared to the projects where open sourcing is allowed.

We have also requested the government to include module manufacturing as part of the DCR to ensure level playing field. For our company, 60 per cent of the module is imported, while 40 per cent is domestically procured.

Do Indian solar manufacturers depend on import of solar cells and modules? Has the government´s new anti-dumping policy had a quantifiable effect?
Most Indian manufacturers import cells from various countries for manufacturing of their own modules. Having Indian manufactured cells increases the module price by approximately 15-20 per cent.

While domestic module manufacturing capacity is increasing albeit slowly to keep pace with the new government announcements, the major point missed by most players in the industry is that modules and inverters are not the only requirement for setting up solar power plants. There is a huge requirement to ramp up capacities for manufacturing other components such as module mounting structures, string combiner boxes, HT & LT panels etc.

At Jakson, we have already taken steps to scale up the manufacturing capability to meet these requirements. We have set up a new manufacturing unit at Greater Noida with annual capacities upto 250 MW for module mounting structures, 800 MW-1,000 MW for string combiner boxes and 70 MW for PV modules.

Will we see manufacturing shaping up in line with new solar project targets?
In our view, it will take at least 3-4 years to reach upto the level as desired by the government/industry, as this requires huge amount of investments and support not only from the central government, but also various state governments in terms of SOPS, Tax Holidays etc.

Domestic manufacturing is still not attracting investment compared to many other countries. Your opinion?
Indian manufacturing has to compete with a flood of imports from the Chinese market and at the present level because of sheer manufacturing capacities, the Chinese have a huge advantage over domestic manufacturers in terms of costs and prices.

Are government initiatives supportive of the sector? How optimistic are you about future prospects? What growth do you expect?
The government on its part is supportive to the sector´s development by bringing in new policies. However, they would be required to do more to promote domestic manufacturing.

We are very optimistic about India´s growth in the solar sector and expect the industry to be growing by at least 20-30 per cent CAGR every year.